Public Nuisances
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER !" The celebrated bodybuilder walked onstage, clothed in a navy blazer, an offwhite, open-necked, collarless cotton shirt, and a pair of flared, khaki-colored...
...That ended the discussion, cleric, or c) some popinjay full of advanced even decency...
...There is no alcoholic beverage he does not like save, naturally, vodka...
...According to Mr...
...believe that intellectuality puts women at a used to call the "woman question...
...Inasmuch as that mode no doubt makeshift bomb factory in an expensive a schizophrenic with three faces...
...He longs to live in London, Rome, Madrid, Jerusalem, New York, or San Francisco, but is too lazy to do anything about it...
...Mencken polemic, especially designed for vanquishing public nuisances...
...If Tyrrell's portrait of America today is accurate, I am glad tobe a cloud...
...and Newsweek and a book was written recent Haven in a Heartless World, it is Evans gives much attention to the alleged about it--and it too cries out for explanagenuinely important because it penetrates oppressiveness of the male' s ',intellectual tion...
...Basic Books / $11.95 My relationship with TyrreU began some years ago when Time magazine declared him the author of" some of the liveliest prose since"...me...
...However, he is dubious of the efficacy of all cures, in medicine, in politics, in religion, or in anything else...
...At four he duly breaks for two barbaric hours on the handball courts...
...Let me instead contain my observations to Tyrrell the man...
...The author of Public Nuisances publicly denounces jogging and health foods, yet follows a strenuous regimen of exercise himself...
...Public Nuisances, Tyrrell's first book, is an attempt to draw a "pointillistic portrait of an especially influential American: the public nuisance...
...As he goes he calls Gore Vidal a jackanapes, Bella Abzug a hater who "longs for the sound of bones breaking," Teddy Kennedy a singing bartender, and the present President of the united States a "grinning dunce," a "really cheap mind," and so forth...
...is called a "political lesbian," one whose lesbianism is the result not of psychosexual disposition but of a deliberate poh'tieal tic preoccupation with the self...
...He visits New York elected in 1980...
...Now be is dead...
...Now rich and famous and pushing upon their middle years, they had traveled from Berkeley and Haight-Ashbury to the Upper East Side, from one stage of adolescence to another, the new one energizing them with Perrier water instead of acid, cladding them in Gucci loafers and Saks Fifth Avenue jogging shorts instead of sandals and tattered jeans...
...He relishes urban life, but lives complacently in Bloomington, Indiana...
...Public Nuisances thoughts...
...He bout with influenza...
...Along the way he rudely bumps off 23 public nuisances, starting with John Kenneth Galbraith and ending with Henry Kissinger...
...His nose is mesorhinian and his nasal index is 46.2...
...After dinner he returns to his desk and either reads or writes until 10:30, whereupon he mixes a cocktail or two and leisurely reads or listens.to music until 11:30...
...Tyrrell brushes his teeth 14 times a day and incessantly washes his hands...
...And he is in his abattoir promptly at 8:30--a little later if traces of alcohol from the evening before are still in his bloodstream...
...Subscription: Volume 2, 1979 (4 issues...
...Starchy conservatives will be upset to hear this but starchy radicals will be no more comfortDiscussing the male chauvinism of the early New Left, Evans tells us that "the decision to identify "totally" with women...
...He rises at seven, almost always in a cheery humor...
...Mahler he listens to politely, but Tchaikovsky he abominates...
...distressingly sketchy his book is at times, competent, the implications of this careless This was no trivial incidentmit made Time and however much it recapitulates his statement are devastating for womankind...
...2] I i the significant ingredients of his art than anyone else...
...Articles are selected for their relevance to public and private philanthropy from the philosophical, economic, social, and political viewpoint...
...Lasch "Bourgeois society," he says, "seems competitive disadvantage, though both the is eclectic and independent-minded, and it everywhere to have used up its store of quality of the Evans dissertation and the will be his reward to be dismissed by constructive ideas...
...And the day dragged on like that until well after midnight, an orgy of self-absorption and "human potential actualization" capped off by a rock-and-disco party with music by "Johnny Average and the Falcons...
...It was apparent now where all the flower children had gone...
...Tyrrell reads four daily newspapers and a half dozen weeklies from America, England, and France...
...Ben Wattenberg has said Tyrrell "writes the funniest stuff in America and he is the biggest public nuisance in America...
...Of all the nights to head off to my bedchamber with only two Gibsons to my credit...
...Thank Jehovah that I spent the early evening listening to a symphony...
...Tyrrell believes in the moral and intellectual repugnancy of all politicians, but is invariably drawn to them and counts several professional politicians as friends...
...His cranial capacity by the system of Deniker is 1756cc...
...He hates Russia not solely for its politics but also for its people, whom he considers to be as inferior as they suspect themselves to be...
...Tyrrell likes most members of Congress...
...Mencken, formerly of the Smart Set, the American Mercury, and the Baltimore Sun, was declared the most influential private citizen in the United States in 1927 by the New York Times...
...As all his intimates know, Tyrrell sleeps on his left side, in the fetal position...
...Even George McGovern he worries about...
...He spends his afternoons with the business of The American Spectator...
...Schwarzenegger ignored that advice and proceeded in his Austrian accent to give a dry, almost academic lecture on "sa role of sa mind een bodybuildingk...
...Back in the lobby, the woman from Eve' s Garden was hawking six-inch-square pink I I I satin pillows embroidered with the message, "I LOVE ME...
...sagas did Evans overlook...
...He has never tasted a martini and never will "until I forsake alcoholic delights...
...He gets squiffed only very infrequently, though he complains of the hangover syndrome once a week...
...He has a long police record...
...176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176 BOOK REVIEW Public Nuisances R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...My ashes were heaved to the winds in 1956...
...simon-pure...
...Sara Evans' hymn to women' s liberation is surely a case-in-point of bourgeois selfexhaustion...
...It is amazing, moreover, that this "history" of women's liberation contains not one word about Diana Oughton, the attractive product of a very affluent Illinois family, who became dations of bourgeois order that have been weakened or destroyed by advanced capitalism itself...
...Grants Magazine is the recipient of the 1978 TSM Award for Outstanding Journal from the Technical, "S.cientific, and Medical Division oft be Association of American Publishers...
...I'd like to thank the great kingpins," she said, "Perrier, who donated the water [all those attending The Event received all the free Perrier water they could swallow], and Dannon Yogurt, and the other corporations that have done so much to promote health...
...He suspects America is becoming like unto Italy, "though without the monuments...
...This is the source of his politics, which can best be described as uneasily libertarian--though he has a very strict personal moral code...
...He drinks 21/4 cups of matutinal coffee and makes somewhat of a ceremony of this, always insisting on either a French bean or the Hawaiian kona variety and always preferring to drink it while in private and while reading...
...e 9 9 9 e o o e $45 00 9 Prices slightly higher outside the U.S...
...IfI were alive today I lanta, Georgia...
...He takes allergy shots and any other type of medication his four doctors will allow...
...However, there is no ironclad de Flore, the Piazza Navona, an outpost in European caf~ sociology...
...mode," but fails to explain what she Sara Evans would not like Christopher bureaucratic liberalism, libertarian con-means in a way that protects the full Lasch...
...Take it AWWWWWF...
...He has no other fixed habits of writing...
...My objections would be pruned down to a few hem-hems, and one of his faithful editors would turn my review into a testimonial to the greatest writer since, well, probably since me...
...If there is an original idea or creative thought in the 232 pages of text, I couldn't find it...
...JSHJNG COR~T~ 227 West 1 7th Street, New York, N.Y...
...10011 fpleiuii 1 The American Spectator May 1979 appropriations were diminished and ten banishment of all members of the Ameri- ing, for instance: disco, drugs, professional percent of the large universities closed or can judiciary and the public flogging of sports, movies, camping, the cosmos of TV, turned into housing projects...
...He disrelishes Capitol Hill, almost has to be mentally deranged to believe the cussion about food with a group of schoolany Washington restaurant, and a seat on liberalmoonshine but that conservatism is teachers, he asked his hostess if she had a jet next ~to" a) a fat woman, b) a liberal not necessarily a sign of intelligence or ever eaten mud...
...He thinks America will ly benign marks him as a generally civiNew York, the National Gallery, the Caf6 always suffer culturally until it adopts lized man...
...Ernest Hemingway and Frank Lloyd Wright also came from the neighborhood...
...Very little is known about him save that which appears in his FBI file, and I, having suffered comparison with him for all these years, probably know more about 2 6 T h e American Spectator May 1979 Tyrrell was raised in a Chicago neighborhood shared by the late S~ n (Momo) Giancana and Tony (Big Turn Arcardo...
...With Leonid coping, astrology, and the self-improvechildren, dogs, and an occasional light Brezhnev he wants to see Jimmy Carter ment and personal growth movements...
...His manservant draws his bath while Tyrrell sings and waits for it to reach 68 degrees Fahrenheit, He eats a large breakfast...
...Nevertheless, he has very little interest in sports as seen on the TV...
...Occasionally he writes in longhand on legal pads, more often he uses his Olivetti Lexikon 82, which he places on his lap due to the lingering effects of a back injury suffered in the company of an aggressive sorority girl in the spring of 1967...
...His favorite drinks are Guinness Stout served along the Liffey, all the juices of France, all beers, all scotches, Jack Daniel's, and the Negroni...
...He firmly believes that the literacy rate in the United States would rise if educational Looking for a grant...
...He reads all American intellectual reviews not injurious to public morals...
...what I had to listen...
...H.L...
...In fact he detests TV and devoutly believes that one day there will appear an article in the New England Journal of Mediaine showing that TV causes brain damage and glaucoma...
...He is polite, particularly to those whom he dislikes...
...9 Please call for your sample copy: (212) 255-0713 ext 220...
...His favorite sounds are the compositions of Franz Schubert, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Ludwig van Beethoven, whom he holds in special reverence...
...I, .for one, don't on what the Communist Party quaintly Just about everyone tastes Lasch's lash...
...He harangued the audience about how "93 percent of the water on tap in this country is unfit for I I human consumption" and how "about 92 percent of the food additives we now use in America we didn't know-about until the Nuremberg Trials...
...He smokes Hofnar Bouquet cigars and encourages everyone to smoke at least one form of tobacco...
...But I happen to know one of the interviewees, and I find it curious that Evans neglects to tell us that this beautiful who can decry the devaluation of the past while understanding that the debauch of culture we witness today is not fundamentally the work of nefarious collectivism, but tion in "Women's Oral History," is long on narration and celebration, but short on female, who had a manly but gentle husband entirely supportive of her feminrather of free-enterprising competitive individualism," which in its decadence has caranalysis, theory, and imagination...
...and shatters many of the tired cliches of...
...This is all very nice...
...He hates "business" lunches and often eats at his desk...
...to the rest of the evening was appalling...
...Tom Wolfe has called TyrreU a "holy terror" and the "funniest political essayist in years...
...ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER !" The celebrated bodybuilder walked onstage, clothed in a navy blazer, an offwhite, open-necked, collarless cotton shirt, and a pair of flared, khaki-colored trousers...
...He believes that one while enduring a particularly painful disClub...
...7 I I 000O0QQOI0oD00I000000I00o00IO0.0IgIOI0O000O0Q0D0IOIO000OQ0QsO0OOa0og0OO.O0O0OO0OOO0eDQQ0oOeOg0@~@~~@~@~~~~@~~@~@~ BOOK REVIEW 7 he Culture of Naraissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations Christopher Lasch / Norton / $11.95 Personal Politias: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left Sara Evans / Knopf / $10.00 Dale Vree Christopher Lasch is a cultural tradi-intellectual mode" that dominated it part of the women's liberation and Weathtionalist, a socialist, and an enemy of "operated to exclude women as lead-ermen scenes, only to blow herself up in a government bureaucracy...
...editor: Virginia White assistant editor: Patrick Tarantino Grants Magazine provides a forum for the lively exchange of information between those who seek grants and those charged with the responsibility for allocating funds and formulating programs through which grants are made available...
...He hates every square foot of At- There are vast ranges of modern Ameri- is his book, not mine...
...He begins the book with some very amusing apocryphal obituaries and ends it with a salutary suggestion for a new style in H.L...
...Pumping Iron, "want-power" is a prerequisite to will-power, though, frankly, I wasn't able to figure out the difference between the two...
...Tyrrell believes, ifI read him right, that the national stage is dominated by personages much less diverse than in my day, but far more repellent, if only in their sameness and the blatancy of their fraudulence...
...His favorite French cities are Paris and Barbizon...
...a Brooklynese woman bellowed from the rear of the auditorium...
...it is a phenomenon that cries out for explanation, able with Lasch: He faults them for wasting their time assaulting "the authoritarian family, repressive sexual morality, literary Dale Vree is Executive Editor of the New yet Evans ignores it...
...GRANTS MAGAZINE The Journal of Sponsored Research and Other Programs will help you unravel the mysteries of obtaining one...
...On the subject of honesty he is a bit of a bore..He writes with total disregard for the feelings of others, and spends more time worrying about people's health and wellbeing than any doctor or Florence Nightingale known to man...
...She is what of happiness to the dead end of a narcissisgossip and trivia...
...What a night...
...If he has writing to do he prefers to start in the morning...
...There is enough truth assertions she makes in it do nothing to ideologues of all varieties for not being in this characteristically Laschian exag-encourage me in this conviction...
...He believes that axiom to explain his behavior...
...It is a ism, junked her husband so she could ried the logic of individualism to the exclassic case of how to pad a dissertation declare herself a lesbian...
...She did not come treme of a war of all against all, the pursuit with unexamined slogans and high.grade out of the closet or woodshed...
...The distance from his fibula to his tibia is five centimeters...
...What emerges is an arresting new theory of American leadership which I commend to the pedagogues for their cerebrations and coronaries...
...However also excluded the mentally slow and in-Manhattan townhouse on March 6, 1970...
...No, Lasch.is not ers...
...He is subthe Golan Heights, Kitty Hawk (North public life renders idiotic almost anyone dued in the company of bores, yet once, Carolina), and the library of the Cosmos who participates in it...
...He likes Richard Nixon as a person...
...he deviates from Correct Thought servatism, and countercultural trendiness...
...He is 35, has a subbrachycephalic skull with a cephalic index of 83.1...
...At a lunch-hour news conference, a certain Suzie Chafee, a pale and frail-looking woman nevertheless introduced by Jerry Rubin as "that great spokesperson for health and symbol of health," put in a kind word for--can you believe it ?--corporations...
...guides to effective grantsmanship...
...He prides himself in making clever put-downs to panhandlers and can be a murderous conversationalist on trivia...
...All eaux de vie he adores...
...loathes the advocates of almost any cause, New York Athletic Club or the Algonquin Tyrrell relishes travel, but Once he has particularly women's liberation...
...The occupants of the offices of HEW won't be comfortable with Lasch either-,-The welfare state is for him the The American Spectator May 1979...
...Next on the speaker's podium was "comedian and human rights activist" Dick Gregory, who came off as a crackpot even at this bizarre affair...
...This datum is more than gossip...
...Work is his favorite therapy, and this ends the review...
...His sight-seeing obvious, but that his hypocrisies are usualPrado, Trader Vic's in San Francisco and is always nocturnal...
...From reading Public Nuisances it is apparent that Tyrrell comes from a noble journalistic tradition, hence he has no sense of fairness whatsoever...
...Tyrrell and I share many tastes, admire many of the same people, and even have friends in common, which is surprising since I died on the evening of January 29, 1956...
...How many other such censorship, the work ethic, and other founOxford Review, and author of On Synthesizing Marxism and Christianity (Wiley) and The Great Bourgeois Cultural Revolution (forthcoming from Oxford University Press...
...But we get only silence from Evans...
...He is a member of two athletic clubs...
...22.50 Institutional rate...
...both have prospered as a likes women, suspects most men, and almost every month and stays either at the consequence of Jimmy's service...
...He wears striped Brooks Brothers pajamas...
...His favorite causes are the can experience about which he knows noth- would be 99 years old...
...All in all pretty tame stuff...
...geration to make his book self-recommend- Most of the unsung women's liberation- Lasch is one of those rare traditionalists ing, though hardly self-validating...
...Tyrrell stands 5'7", though he is rarely seen standing...
...arrived in any city he likes to bar the door follows a moral code of strict hypocrisy is His favorite places on this earth are the to his quarters and read...
...But Tyrrell is not me...
...Undoubtedly this book will be reviewed in other journals and it would be as unseemly to praise it in Tyrrell's magazine as it would be hopeless to condemn it...
...Her book, a doctoral dissertaists chronicled by Evans are unfamiliar names to me...
...listings of seminars, conferences, and workshops in the grants and development fields...
...That he Hotel, presumably because I stayed there...
...Grants Magazine also publishes information about grant programs...
...I detected stares and murmurings of incredulity from the crowd, hitherto aswim in credulousness...
...Since then our names have often been linked, and so it is not inappropriate that The American Spectator would ask me to review this book...
...He believes firsthand experience with anything is bound to be deluding, and insists that anything worth knowing can best be grasped from the printed word...
...dignity of womanhood...
...Jerry Rubin, shining his Moonie smile, was telling all who would listen that The Event was "wrapping up the 70s and ushering in the 80s...
...He reads Shakespeare, Cervantes, Conrad, Faulkner, and all best-sellers apprising Americans of the modus operandi for such things as sexual bliss and the acquisition of a flat stomach...
...He admires Dufy, Monet, C&anne, Bernini, Fra Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico--in fact much of the Renaissance and even the Primitives...
...Most of his serious reading today is in history and political theory...
Vol. 12 • May 1979 • No. 5
